Nice Mon Amour

by forumholitorium

The first Christmas I spent away from my family was in Nice. I was 34 and my aunt and godmother had died of pancreatic cancer in April, a handful of sand slipping through our fingers in the short span of three months. When someone you love fades so quickly, when you look into the face of death, it shakes you and questions you can’t afford to ignore start haunting you. What do I really want? What have I always dreamed of and still haven’t done? What will I regret not having done if death were to come calling on me soon? One of my answers was spending time on the French Riviera in winter. So I bought myself a train ticket to Nice.

Sometimes you need to do things for yourself that the people you love do not understand at the time, things that are connected to the private realms within you that normally remain out of sight yet steer you along your path through life. That year was a year of transition and often painful transformation, and it was clear that I needed a time out to nourish my soul. Nice symbolizes a time I dared to take care of myself and make a dream become reality.

I started my day with a coffee and a stroll along the Promenade des Anglais, appreciating how winter felt and envying the Niçois who could do this every day, sitting and staring at the Mediterranean in all kinds of weather.

Christmas on the Riviera was so markedly different from what I had known before – palm trees decked out with white lights, oranges ripening on the trees, the Christmas market serving up socca, the ultimate in street food, a chickpea flour flatbread baptized in olive oil. This ancient city has a remarkable wealth of art and I was able to go to museums devoted to two of my favorite artists, Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall. No city on the Mediterranean would be complete without mosaics, and this mermaid and merman are still working hard to keep things in balance.

Nice has recently been catapulted into limelight because of the painful events of Thursday evening. I feel it is important to revisit and share my positive memories of Nice to affirm the beauty of that city and to prevent all the negative images flooding the media from sticking to it. My heart goes out to those who were on the Promenade, those who lost someone they loved, those who stared into the face of death and are now asking themselves those important questions.

A few years back, I had a conversation with an unhappy, grizzled, chain-smoking man who stated that the world would be a better place if more people listened to the music of Georges Moustaki, the great French singer-songwriter who died in Nice in 2013. I agree. Here are the original French lyrics to one of his songs followed by my English translation.